The right hates affirmative action; the left champions it. Both caricature it, which is partly what David Paul Kuhn does in RealClearPolitics – Obama, Sotomayor, Ricci and White Male Privilege. But, Kuhn also gets a couple things right, by estimation.

Here, for example, is where he misses the mark in describing the ebb in white male privilege:

“The ebb is seen in earnings. Working class women still make less than working class men. But between 1979 and 2003, those women’s earnings advanced 12 percent while men’s earnings declined 8 percent. White men’s earnings have generally stagnated since the early 1970s. Amid this financial crisis, when adjusted for inflation, white men generally make less in 2009 than they did in 1969.”

He misses here. This is not about the ebbing of male authority, it seems to me, but a consequence of the move toward equal pay for women–something that is far from concluded. This, then, it seems to me is not a measure of discrimination against men or of failing male authority (as men still hold the preponderance of political and social power) but of a move toward pay equity.

On a second point, though, I think he is absolutely correct, and I don’t think that the left understands it. Kuhn writes, “Ricci (the firefighter in the New Haven case) personifies the vast majority of middle and working class white men who lack clout. This is at the heart of the brooding angst over affirmative action. The sense of dissatisfaction among these men is less that they were being blamed for past white men’s ills, as Obama noted in his race speech, than the practical impact of opportunity lost.”

Here, I think that he is onto something. Most affirmative action cases involve folks (white and black) from working-class and non-privileged economic backgrounds.  Because, it is working-class folks, people with a relative lack of resources, the impact of the cases are more personal than political. For white working-class men, not getting a promotion or not getting hired is felt at the most basic level, just as it is for non-white men. Their angs over such cases is usually not as much about race as it is about real-life consequences. The left views this as racism or whining about the end of a privilege.

Critics and defenders of affirmative action pay little attention to its class dynamics and neither seem interested in true meritocracy as evidenced by their general silence on the most obvious of places where it is practiced: college admission.

Indeed, affirmative action is alive and well most powerfully in the United States in this area (college admissions) that matters a great deal in life outcomes.  Specifically, legacies (those whose family members went to a college) receive the greatest degree of admissions preference, next to athletes, and alongside racial minorities. However, nobody is litigating preferences given to children of alumni. Everyone is battling over race affirmative action, which reveals, I think, that the debate on affirmative action has merely become a proxy for the battle on race.

It would be refreshing if the right actually started to champion meritocracy and took on affirmative action in all its forms. It would be equally nice for the left to come to terms with this as well.